Rethinking thinking - Trevor Maber An excellent way to better understand the Ladder of Inference is to work in a small group and talk about a pattern of behavior that everyone can relate to. Some examples (in addition to the parking lot example) include: someone cutting in front of you in a line at the store; a friend or family member who is always annoyingly late; or someone who leaves you disappointed because he/she breaks more promises than he/she keeps. As you each share your experience, focus on what assumptions are at play, the conclusions you are each drawing from those assumptions, and what emotions you feel as a result. What are you seeing and learning as you hear how different everyone’s ladder can be?On one half of a sheet of paper, draw your own version of a ladder (make sure it has 7 rungs!) and label it with the terms that have been presented.
Hearing Is Our Least Trustworthy Sense by Orion Jones We like to think we perceive the world just as everyone else does. That's what makes communication possible, and without a baseline reality, how would science proceed? But our sense of hearing is remarkably unreliable, say sound psychologists. And since hearing is one out of just five senses we use to perceive the world, that's a little concerning. Or one out of seven if you count proprioception and vestibular sensation — and hey, why not? Just yesterday, for example, I missed a call from an unfamiliar number, and because I haven't set up my voicemail yet (who needs it?!) Ironically, our sense of hearing is unreliable because of its robust ability to create meaning from otherwise random sounds. Diana Deutsch, sound psychologist at UC San Diego, says that how we hear sounds depends on the tonality of our mother tongue, which varies greatly from country to country. Read more at BBC Future.
Chimps, Like Humans, Act Out When They Know They're Right by Monica Joshi Chimpanzees are marvelous creatures. Jane Goodall has spent her whole life trying to understand them. As chimps share over 98 percent of our DNA, they have been known to make and hunt with spears. Researchers at Georgia State University, Agnes Scott College, Wofford College, and the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York have discovered that chimpanzees not only are capable of metacognition, but also can adjust their behaviour based on this metacognition. Published in the journal Cognition, their findings suggest that this reflects a form of cognition control that underlies intelligent decision-making across species. Humans are able to report confidence in a few different ways such as: using an oral reportage of confidence or lack thereof, numerical rating scales, and body language. In the course of the study, three chimps were tested using a series of computerized tests. Audrey Parrish, researcher from Georgia State pointed out that:
Prague Holds The Secret To Great Art by Jason Hreha What conditions are necessary for great art? Does it merely require a person of extreme genius to come along? Does it require patronage and lots of money? What about a vibrant and active community? Belief in a transcendent power? Each of these questions was on my mind as I walked through the streets of Prague a couple of weeks ago. Prague is a city that forces you to feel humble. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the west coast of California, in which a 100-year-old claptrap building is “ancient,” is the home of audacious visions and innovation. Tradition is filled with barriers to entry, but it’s also filled with beauty. Our modern cities today look as if they were made out of cardboard boxes and Lego pieces. The buildings that make up much of Prague, however, have crown moulding more beautiful than half the pieces in the Museum of Modern Art. This is the conclusion that scholar Charles Murray came to in his great tome, Human Accomplishment.
In All Chaos There is a Cosmos – Carl Jung “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous relics of earlier evolutionary stages going back to even the reptilian age, so the human psyche is likewise a product of evolution which, when followed up to its origins, show countless archaic traits. A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. My interests drew me in different directions. Mother is motherlove, my experience and my secret. ~Carl Jung~ Source: Wikiquotes Like this:
The Phrontistery: Obscure Words and Vocabulary Resources 8 - Polar Mythology ©2011, montalk.net (Version 0.1 – changelog provided at end of article) The Meaning of Myth Since myths are not literal accounts of history, they are easily dismissed as superstitious tales invented by our naïve ancestors. But what society considers factual, historical, and real is only that which has taken place within linear time and 3D space, namely events witnessed through the five physical senses. Far from being less than factual, myths may depict events and dynamics that are more than factual because they hail from beyond the limited modern conception of reality, beyond linear time, and beyond the five senses. What are myths really? Like dreams, myths allow passage of information across the boundary between realms. Myths are also like time capsules with nested layers, each layer encoding information intended for one type of recipient. Entertainment and Morality Layer – the outer wrapping that ensures the myth propagates through the generations. Polar Mythology (from Hamlet’s Mill)
Synchronicity Synchronicity is the occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but not causally related. Synchronicity holds that such events are "meaningful coincidences". The concept of synchronicity was first defined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, in the 1920s.[1] During his career, Jung furnished several slightly different definitions of it.[2] Jung variously defined synchronicity as an "acausal connecting (togetherness) principle," "meaningful coincidence," and "acausal parallelism." He introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture.[3] In 1952, he published a paper "Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge" (Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle)[4] in a volume which also contained a related study by the physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli.[5] In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:[6] Description[edit] Examples[edit] Criticisms[edit]
How's the Anthropocene Era going? by David Ropeik More than once in China, under a gloaming pall of poisonously polluted, air I have watched oceans of people flood the streets and shops of Beijing or Chengdu or Guangzhou acquiring the material goods that they hope might improve their lives, and thought to myself, “We’re screwed. The Earth just can’t handle this.” And more than once I have stood in my local Costco and looked at the warehouse glutted with mountains of food and clothes and household goods, and thought to myself, “And this is just one store! The dark implications of such voracious consumption, and all the waste and damaging pollution it generates, are frequently framed in big-picture "think globally" terms, with analysis of global population and global climate and the global economy, and from that perspective the future can look pretty bleak. Those instincts are fundamentally embedded in our basic biology. There are those who hold just that hope. image courtesy International Biosphere Geosphere Program
Sports rage by Robert Montenegro Quick. Take a guess as to which part of the year sees the biggest spike in domestic violence incidents in the United States. "Do we take sports too seriously?" This is the question asked by Dr. Sports have long been an outlet for fans' own personal frustrations. "Rageful sports fans are usually people who suppress their anger about other frustrating or painful aspects of their lives. Social media and the 24/7 sports news cycle only add additional fuel to the fire. And fans too often make it personal. All you have to do is search "Rosenthal" and "sucks" on Twitter to sift through the thousands of rageful tweets vomited out by St. Take a look at Facebook comments on an NFL post and you'll find hundreds of people blasting players like Russell Wilson and Ben Roethlisberger who had rough games on Sunday. Kimmel recommends sitting down with friends and family members who you've seen react too intensely to their team's misfortunes. Read more at Post Periodical